Swarms of Black Flies Make the Roses Purple

Swarms of Black Flies Make the Roses Purple presented instances of collaboration practices concerned with technologies of production. In particular the exhibition explored how contemporary artists manipulate technologies for artistic purpose. With precedents provided through the work of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin (whose work was included in the show) the exhibition presented new works that investigate artistic communion and transmutation. Collaborative work I produced with Simon O'Sullivan for the exhibition explored the use of mathemes (diagrams) as process for writing and imagining subjectivities and avatars and the manipulation of reading/speech functions of computers to produce 'cut-up' texts.

There is not and never has been anything to understand!

The exhibition was curated by myself and Simon O'Sullivan as a communiqué from Plastique Fantastique, our performance fiction collaboration. Our curation of the work by 21 artists, artist collectives and theorists (including Reza Negarestani, Suzanne Treister, John Russell, Joanne Tatham & Tom O'Sullivan, Benedict Drew and John Gillis & Aline Bouvy, John Cussans & Roberto Peyre, Dean Kenning, Pil & Galia Kollectiv) involved inviting practitioners to collaborate on a large installation and fanzine publication. The exhibition presented new art by practitioners working with diagrammatic approaches and/or concerned with traversing genres. The exhibitors shared an interest in fiction, appropriation and speculative thought or the inhuman. The exhibition was conceived as a 'crystalline' presentation that challenged conventions of exhibiting discrete and separate works, achieved by placing works in a diagram pasted throughout the space and curating the sound-bleed of the various audio works to create a layered and disorientating effect. The exhibition was a meta-diagram presenting and producing relations between cosmic, biological, social and political and sacred economies. Simon O'Sullivan and myself produced two works for the show, an 'Alter to the pre-industrial modern' in collaboration with Tom Clark, and 'Plastique Fantastique crystal matheme'. The exhibition concluded with two performances by WE and Neil Chapman and Ola Stahl.

THIS THIS MONSTER THIS THINGS

‘THIS THIS MONSTER THIS THINGS’, was curated by Giorgio Sadotti curated the exhibition and created an exquisite corpse from objects produced by fifty-one artist each producing a body part for a monster. This process resulted in a meta-artwork, a bastard object or a curatorial monster that mockingly presents a ‘complete’ entity. I produced a colon for the monster with songs - 'Power of Love', 'I feel Love', 'Love will tear us apart' - to form the sound of a troubled digestion system.

Night is also a Sun: G-lbl Hystr-c P-nc J-peg

'Night is also a Sun: G-lbl Hystr-c P-nc' J-peg was an exhibition of hand-cut paper cut-outs, mobiles and audio-visual work that addressed viral mutation, propagation, repetition and collapse. A collision between visual styles, the artifice of pictograms and the characteristics of the handmade was staged through mixing the analogue and the digital. The exhibition explored one proposition: ‘Pain is also joy, curse is also a blessing, night is also a sun…’ That is, the sun – an analogy for enlightenment – is eclipsed by the intensity of its after-image, (absolute vision is blind and blinding). The exhibited work draws upon traditional, folk and mass media artifacts such as Halloween silhouettes, Chinese paper cuts and flow diagrams and presents search-engine trash as good fortune charms, sigils and diagrams and symbols of anxiety and aspiration.

Mulitverse Expanded and Multiverse

'Mulitverse Expanded' at Akershus Kunstsenter Norway 2011 is the expansion of an ongoing exhibition project instigated by Ole Hagen, with Multiverse at Danielle Arnaud in London and its accompanying performance event Open Multiversity at Swedenborg Hall in 2009, for which myself and Simon O'Sullivan produced texts, artworks and performances for. The project invited six artists and the writer Michael Morcock to experiment with fiction and narrative as a tool for investigating notions of multiple worlds and universes within science, art, culture and philosophy. Simon and I produced diagrams of performances (figures for the processes, fictions and subjective and physical states that the performances produced) in the form of films, assemblages and large-scale wall works. The diagrams drew upon figures produced by modern thinkers such as Henri Bergson and Jacques Lacan, but also folk and sacred imagery that presented finite and infinite relations and transformations and becomings.

The Diagram: Blackboard Series

The exhibition invited artists and a philosopher to produce a blackboard drawing, reflecting their interest in diagrams. The project was curated by Banner Repeater and Folio Magazine for Space London and Dail Zero for Istanbul Biennale, Torna Istanbul. I appropriated a world health organization diagram presenting epidemics to produce a flow diagram of hysteria and human and animal mutation. The diagrams produced for the project were photographed in London where they were sent to Istanbul to be redrawn, which causing further mutations of icons and symbols. My diagram was produced with this process in mind. I also produced a text, 'The Diagram: a user's guide', that explored anthropological, philosophical and aesthetic notions concerning diagrams for a publication produced by Banner Repeater. Also taking part were John Mullarkey, Claire Nichols, Dean Kenning, Clunie Reid.

Impossible Diagrams

The exhibition explored the ways in which art, as a diagrammatic practice, facilitates the production of impossible objects and events, in ways similar to how topology and mathematics facilitates the infinite to be thought. Through one projected film, three monitor works and 23 hand-manipulated printed posters works. The work was presented through the collaboration Plastique Fantastique. The diagram was utilised as means for capturing the relations and experiences produced through performance art and ritualised performance.

Plastique Fantastique TV: towards non-human propaganda!

The exhibition consisted of an hour long compilation of films that presented documentation of performances spliced and edited into recorded television programmes and news casts, emphasising and exploring the flatness and formal aspects of the TV screen often overlooked by conventional TV. 30 original posters, manipulated by hand through drawing and spraying, presented texts, images and diagrams concerning modes of performance that employed disorientation and play as mythopoetic art practice.

We are grammer.

The exhibition presented a survey of art practices that employed text and writing, different to first and second generation conceptual artists. The exhibition focused on the use of language in art located at the intersection of philosophy, current thinking on art, and contemporary theories of language. The exhibition presented collaborative art work made with Simon O'Sullivan, as plastique fantastique, that explored the notion of performance fiction.

Rubble Stir

Work presented for the exhibition included a mobile of images derived from news images of a single day, and sculpture reference russian constructivist propaganda machines broadcasting three songs concerning work, labour and the future. The works combined to reflect upon different notions of the new in mass and avant-garde culture.

Avalon

The exhibition surveyed contemporary art practices identified with 'a new medievalism' and an interest in folk, craft and scared cultures as means of critiquing modernity and economic and social structures. The exhibition concerned work that reveisted the past to investigate a 'pre-modern futurity'. Work presented through plastique fantastique collaboration utilised the notion of sigils and détournement to present logos from communication industries as 'spell-binding' symbols of capture that utilise repetition to become part of the fabric of culture.

Dead fingers talking

Dead Fingers Talk was an exhibition presenting two unreleased tape experiments by William Burroughs from the mid 1960s alongside responses by 23 artists, musicians, writers, composers and curators. Few writers have exerted as great an influence over such a diverse range of art forms as William Burroughs. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and Junky, continues to be regularly referenced in music, visual art, sound art, film, web-based practice and literature. One typically overlooked, yet critically important, manifestation of his radical ideas about manipulation, technology and society is found in his extensive experiments with tape recorders in the 1960s and ’70s. Dead Fingers Talk: The Tape Experiments of William S. Burroughs was the first exhibition to truly demonstrate the diversity of resonance in the arts of Burroughs’ theories of sound. Work exhibited for the exhibition, as plastique fantatsique, explored Burroughs notion of recordings as reality, mixing recorded sounds of cats with recent news broadcasts and recordings of fake new broadcasts.

Tatton Biennial 2010

The work 'A history of the visitation' presented for the Biennial included a public art work/structure, two performances and comic. The research addressed alternative forms for a public art work other than that of sculpture in a public space by investigating a local myth about a site - and through re-enactment and fiction, engaging the audience in performance and the creation of myth. The performances and the comic explored notions of ritual and disorientation as a means to arrest habit and habits of perception. in doing so, the structure referenced Robert Smithson's ideas and interest in enantiomorphic chambers and the performances referenced performance art engaged in acts of endurance from the 1970s.

Library of Babel/in and out of place

Man Plus

The research explored the notion of a body without hierarchies in science fiction, in particular in Frederik Phol's novel 'Man Plus', comparing and marking similarities to Antonin Artaud's notion of the body in 'To be done with the Judgement of God' in which the term 'Body Without Organs' is first used.

Salute in the distance

The theme of the exhibition was translation. For this two person show with Miao Xiaochun, work was presented that examined the notion of evolution and cultural presentations of nature and culture in mass culture and art.

Stranger things are happening

Stranger Things Are Happening brought together artists that use diverse media to create works which convey bizarre scenarios, poking at the human psyche. The artists involve themselves either as character or as narrator, using theatrical backdrops and humour to delve into the more challenging and questionable asp ects of society. They invent fantasy personalities and situations that examine matters such as the hysteria around mass media and popular culture, and the place the characters (or us as individuals) have within them. The work presented through the collaboration plastique fantastique addressed notions of performance fiction and the notion of impermanence and the ways in which the new and time are presented in consumer culture and folk culture.

Multiverse

Multiverse brought together artists who use fiction to access the virtual potential for multiple co-existing worlds. The term multiverse, first coined by William James, has become associated with quantum theory and new cosmology. Applied to the universe it implies that there could be an infinite number of universes decohered from each other. It also operates in relation to the idea of a multidimensional hyperspace. The scientific future of the term might be uncertain, but it can describe a radical way of considering fiction. For the exhibition, through the collaboration Plastique Fantastique, works presented explored notions and forms of the diagram to present subjective experience of performance and the multiplicity of potential fictions that imagine non human worlds or durations. In particular, the Möbius Strip, impossible objects from mathematics, Lacan's Torus and Bergson's cone were utilised to explore ways of making the multiplicity and infinity of the multiverse accessible to thought through art works and drawings.

Star Maker

Star Maker was devised by Mark Harris and David Burrows, both of whom thought of an exhibition drawing upon ideas about matter, life-forms, time, entropy and utopia in Olaf Stapledon’s book Star Maker at exactly the same time. The pair surveyd and selected artists that shared a common interests in the non-human and the cosmic, entropy and geological time.

Event Horizon

'Diagrams of the Black Mass for Partial Objects' was an installation, presented for the exhibition Event Horizon. The work was produced in collaboration with Simon O'Sullivan as Plastique Fantastique. We produced a diagram, in the form of a large glass, a vitrine and a felt mat, referencing the alchemical and mathematical notions found in the work of Marcel Duchamp, Henri Bergson's notion of the 'pure present' and sacred practices concerned with immateriality and impermanence. The assemblage was designed as a platform to frame mass media images and consumer objects. The work was designed to foreground and contrast different notions of the new, temporality, duration and materiality. Films of the black mass performance were on display for the duration of the show, the works were 'activated' through the performance of a 'Black Mass for Partial Objects' (a term used to designate elements within arrangements or economies of desire). The performance took place in Bond Street - through a procession and the purchasing of fashion items - and in the Galleries of the Royal Academy - where the objects were 'fossilised' through emersion in oil and silicon and glitter. Following this, an inversion occurred, a member of the performance group was inverted and a 'demon' broadcast a communiqué concerning the technologies of consumer culture and the ways in which time is captured or presented by such technologies. The research took the form of performance and fiction to explore temporality in art, mass media and scared cultures.

One Day Comic

Berlin-based Henrik Schrat’s one-day-comic concept focuses on the short term, but intense cooperation of two artists or artist-groups. Without any previous preparation, two artists meet in the morning, and start to develop a comic strip together – to be completed in one day. Schrat's collaboration with the collaboration Plastique Fantastique produced a comic called 'product clearing' that examined consumerism and ritual. The comic appeared on bill boards in the city and advertised a website where the adventures of individuals 'cured' of consumerism could be found.

100 years, 100 artists, 100 works

Transport for London (TFL)/Platform for Art commissioned 100 artists were asked to reflect on the Roundel design that signifies the tube system and produce a work. Work was exhibited at Rochelle school and made into editions of prints.

Protocols for Deceleration

The exhibition, presented through the collaboration of Plastique Fantastique, was designed as a series of 'clearing' stations to disconnect the veiwer, wishing to follows a series of protocols, from their attachment to objects, commodities and identifications. The exhibition addressed how performance art echoes the practices of religions, cults and state institutions concerned with subjectification, control and enlightenment.

New Work UK Screenings

The screening event presented the film 'The Chymical Wedding' produced through the collaboration Plastique Fantastique, and addressed the notion of the impossibility of the sexual relation through performance and masochism. The Chymical Wedding was a parade and ritual performed at Tate Britain that looked back to the custom of ‘mumming’. Traditionally, ‘mummers’ would wander the country, drunk and in masks, and gatecrash New Year festivities to perform a play. Drawing also upon Sascha Masoch and John Dee, The Chymical Wedding forms part an ongoing series of communiqués.

All over the new smart

The exhibition presented magazine covers as messages from strangers, designed to channel our attention in specific ways, through the signifying and asignifying (or affective) aspects of the images and material properties of the glossy covers. The covers were presented as powerful and affective 'technologies' or designs that demand and construct specific subjectivities. Through the collages, Burrows explores, amongst other things, the following three approaches as a means of responding to these messages, with the aim of harnessing or countering the power of these mass media communiqués. Doodles - a playful technology that harnesses the durations that escape attention paid to everyday matters. Doodles are made in a distracted, absent-minded state without the aim of communication. Burrows’ doodles create ‘all-over’ and ‘from any-direction-whatever’ compositions. Diagrams - a technology that marks out or indexes movements, forces, thoughts, actions and desires that traverses representation. Sigils - abstract or graphic images and symbols, often made with extreme care and craft, which are developed from spelling out and then abstracting wishes and incantations. Through this process, the original wish or incantation is forgotten except at an unconscious level. In practices that utilise sigils, the wish is burnt into the mind by an individual concentrating intently on the sigil which is often destroyed at the end of the process. The covers, with their logos and images of consumer culture were presented as powerful sigils, and the work, in turn was presented as seeking to produce new, 'detourned' or counter sigils.